Tuesday, June 8, 2010

A new format for school visits

Yes, I'm done with summer reading program school visits. But I'm NOT done with other school visits! I made a big push (big for me - I hate advertising stuff) for teachers to consider regular school visits to the library. We have two elementary schools within walking distance. I am very excited that I got a 3rd grade teacher interested in a monthly visit...and a couple classes of kindergarteners wanted to come too! Of course, the fact that we have air-conditioning had nothing to do with it...heh heh. Anyways, I had one class of kindergarteners today and a second coming tomorrow. The teachers are interested in doing regular visits next year and I'm very happy!

My preschool storytimes have dwindled to the point of nothingness. I can think of a lot of reasons for this - the time change (from 10:30 to 11) worked well for a while, but then people didn't like it anymore. We had a lot of flu go through the preschoolers earlier this year. Lots of preschool families had new babies and decided to go to the younger storytimes.

I'm changing the preschool storytime this summer (from 11 to 9:30) and giving the toddlers the 10:30 slot. Unless we have a huge response, I'm seriously considering dropping to one preschool storytime a week - or even letting preschoolers combine with toddlers - and focusing on school visits. We shall see.

Anyhow, I'm working out a school visit formula. Normally, we have a tour, storytime, and then I hand out library cards. This time we had a much longer time so we had a partial tour (I don't always take the younger kids upstairs, which is adult nonfiction, local history, and young adult area) then a storytime, then we did a craft! I used our snazzy custom die from Accucut to make some more butterfly masks and our new jumbo fish die. The kids colored with markers and crayons and added a popsicle stick with tape. They were very happy with the simple craft and even happier that I read them the rest of The Book That Eats People, which I'd sampled when I visited their classrooms. It also helped to remind them again about the summer reading program, as many had forgotten details.